Silent Dining at New York Restaurant

A restaurant in New York City has started a unique new concept, dining in silence, according to NBC News.

The chef at Eat, located in the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, Nicholas Nauman, said he was inspired to have silent meals after he traveled to India and saw Buddhist monks eat their meals in silence.

"It's just an opportunity to enjoy food in a way you might not have otherwise," Nauman said to NBC News. "There's such a strong energy in the room."

The meal still has background noises, as diners can hear the sounds of the forks on dishes and the cooks preparing meals in the kitchen.

The experience is similar to other attention grabbing concepts, according to experts. The restaurant business is very competitive, so sometimes chefs create a concept to make their restaurant stand out from the crowd.

At Moto, a restaurant in Chicago, diners can eat the menu, while at Dans le Noir?, a restaurant with location in Paris, London, Barcelona and Moscow, diners eat in the dark. Pop-up restaurants where one chef takes over the restaurant of another chef are also a trend.

"As a mother of two 15-year-old boys it is kind of a fantasy to go do that," Tanya Steel, the editor of Epicurious.com, said of silent eating. "But as someone who pays money to go out, I would feel like I'm in some kind of silent film; it would be incredibly difficult."

The restaurant offers a $40 prix fixe, four-course meal when they hold the silent dining nights.

When they held a silent dining night recently, diners didn't seem to mind the lack of conversation as they ate the salad and soup, enjoying the first course of their meal.

"It's kind of like a meditation," Jordon Colon, the owner of Eat, said. "The silence speaks for itself."